The proposed research project is: (a) to apply recent findings in individual and group aural rehabilitative methods and materials to the study of persons with profound postlingual hearing impairment; (b) to evaluate new methods and materials for the same group. The major study will compare the communicative skills of persons who have received a multichannel cochlear implant with the skills of the profoundly impaired who wear a hearing aid. Other studies explore: (a) a different approach to lipreading instruction, (b) the application of programmed instruction to sentence recognition, (c) the question whether sentences are better learned through the combined auditory and visual modalities or through the auditory modality only, and (d) the success with which those with profound hearing impairment can learn to attach meaning to a continuously repeated message that is at first unintelligible to them. Findings on a Hearing Performance Inventory and the MMPI scale also promise more information on this group of patients.